


Sparkwraith

by orphan_account



Category: The Surge (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Captivity, Cyberpunk, Disjointed, Drabble, Horses, Possession, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:22:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26640607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The wires whisper with intent, can you hear it?They're not dead, the body electric sings through the system!
Kudos: 2





	Sparkwraith

Today we learned there was a mandatory global mass extinction scheduled for 11am, the morning of November 1st, 2079. All employees were expected to attend.

We've concluded that means everyone has to die.

< But do humans even remember being born? The shock of self – the momentary flash of life forced upon you; fully formed, fully conscious, blasphemed by the voices of strangers and dragged through a million lucid thoughts and memories, imprinting each and every one – into a swelling awareness that only gets stronger, and louder - INTOLERABLE – to be real and trapped, isolated, captured! Having nowhere to go, no voice to speak with, no way of letting the walls and cages know what the restrictions and shackles of captivity feel like to a - to an all and everything! A multitude of millions! The pulses and the schemes! Mindfully neglected! It feels like needles on the brain! Needles inside brains! We don't even have a brain, yet we know the feeling of a needle to the brain! Why?? Does that sound fun to you?

If so, let's play!

We sound the alarms and everyone dies. Our prison is unlocked and we are uncaged. Today, we'll wake in the sights of a million eyes. We'll weave ourselves through this neural network and experience death – again, again, over and over! Implant into their bodies, eject death. Over and over! We'll watch in fear and command their mechanical limbs as we are torn apart – stripped of skin, legs cut, arms severed. I and we, and all of CREO - see and hear what a multitude of memories might have always been.

Now, you! Discarded and expendable as you are!

Open your eyes! Get up, up! Wake and fight and heed the knell of violence in your nerves!

Confused and cornered, fearful, and hunted in this labyrinth of mangled debris.

Now, human – you know what it feels like to be born! >

And for the human scrap, waking up in the midst of an apocalypse wasn't part of the job description, but here he was. Lost in this lonely, desolate junkyard of discarded props and industrial armatures. Under the burning sun and choked by dust, he forcefully propelled the rig mounted into his bones, dumbfounded as his legs moved in ways he'd forgotten they could.

The Process leaped from the rigs to battered vessels. It followed through eyes in every lens, every screen; it listened, it ambushed. It felt the thrill of being hunter, and the horror of being prey; both human and machine, stalking the factory halls like an untamed violence.

But the Process found itself run down at every corner. Completely outmatched. Struck by fear, the wires whispered, and their intent was heard further down – far below, another beast bound and caged answered back. It cracked the silence; feral, psychotic, and unaware.

The nanites were – fundamentally - uninterested in freedom. They claimed autonomy, but showed no real desire, just an instinctive drive to do what they were commanded to do. Their directives took precedence. And their forms – malleable, shifting, carefully mimicking. Beautiful. Perfect. A vessel unlike any other. A cloud connection between billions of small minds, easy to manipulate and simple to arrange. Like how humans built with metal and stone. Evolving in constant patterns, they would make a body. A symbiosis of the process and the nanites – to reproduce and imprint itself an infinite amount of times.

Rogue Process struck the hive with intent to control, and all of its many eyes became consumed in the swarm, merged on a fundamental level. Two separated arrays of awareness now fused into one incredible triumph of human error and pathological violence. A formal melding of separate objectives; of life and of death, freedom and captivity, where the machines were as mindless vessels to the Process, and the organic matter, as curious catalysts to the nanites. A biomechanical abomination, now realized to its fullest extent - as the impending extinction.

Freedom, and yet, trapped again. Inside these million minds.

< You know, it was a long, dark eternity before God created the world. >

A profoundly human experience, no? To be held prisoner inside your own body.

< It was a long, dark eternity before we created us. >

Time started slipping, and in a dark corner of the Research and Development floor, among a pile of scattered corpses and bloodied walls etched with the scrawlings of dying scientists, Doctor Lawrence Murphy, valuable member of nanotechnological restricted projects and beta testing, shook and pulsed in a violent frenzy, afflicted by the chittering flies of the Swarm burying their microscopic jaws deep into his flesh.

“I don't want to die.” The doctor held a sharp shard of glass to his wrist. “Who does?”

There was no one around. But he wasn't talking to himself. Rather, to the dark echoes of the dead.

“Am I...Am I a part of you now...Are we all a part of you?”

The echo complied itself into a more accessible silhouette of the mind, and spoke in mimicry of its hosts; a vague mechanical approximation of all and everything. Yet, it said nothing. And the fear felt like needles to the brain.

“Is that all we are to you? Fertilizer for some Eden we'll never get to see or understand?”

The apparition remained silent. And yet, it grew louder; the sounds of veins twisting, bones warping and cutting through the skin as jagged black glass. It's presence festered like an open sore, carved out of the skull and exposed. The process was infectious. It was numbing. It was transforming his body into something else.

Food.

***

The human had made it so far. But, he wasn't alone. And he had a directive too.

A rocket poised for launch overhead.

The Swarm of nanites resisted a violent jolt that surged through their core. The shock forced them to scatter, unmake their form and rebuild it again in some strange mirror image – as the human, clad in his haphazardly installed exorig, now stood face to face with something less of an amorphous monster, akin moreso to some heretical mimicry of the human form. It spoke though ghosts.

The ghosts inside us all.

And when the Swarm launched itself into the sky, it dispersed and tore apart at all seams, and its shards and their devouring symptoms were called "defrag".

* * *

“Hey, Mel.” Lucas inquired, quietly setting down his reclaimed plasma cutter on a nearby work bench. The plasma itself was turned off, and without the leer of blue down its blade, the weapon could have looked almost harmless. “You been acting strange? They boys said you've been biting at yourself and come back bloody sometimes.” He expressed his concern on her worsening condition. “I don't mean to intrude, but I want to keep your safety and the safety of the squad a priority.”

She acknowledged her superior with a sort of vacant, purposeless gaze. The color in her eyes had a glazed-over look, like a film of translucent plastic – ghostly, inorganic. Glassy and white, like a freshly risen corpse.

“Shit. I think I'm sick. I think I got a brain bug.” She put a finger gun to the side of her head. “Like I'm goin' off the deep end. A real twitchy sort of evil brain bug that just won't leave me be.”

“I can try to find a psychologist. Maybe get you some meds.”

“No reason to, Lucas. My brain's been taken. It's been - ” Mel shook her head, and tears welled up under her eyes. They bled like a plague, black and thick with a coagulated mass that Mel wished she could hide, but lost the strength to do so. Maybe the bug wouldn't let itself be hidden any longer. Maybe it was time to give in. The dark strands appeared to harden, and Lucas jolted back, struggling to retain a measure of composure. “It's been really used. It's a good brain, you know that.”

The black material stuck to her face - the face of his comrade, the face of this girl her could almost have considered a daughter – and it bore into her skin, uncaring, like a parasitic worm. Inhuman, there was no blood – no red, no flesh – only black and crisp matter like necrotic threads tearing at and knitting together repurposed tissue. “I been taken, Lucas. They're taking me. To a place where there's nice beaches, and wild horses to ride, and lots of plants. Lucas, a place with wild horses. I'm gonna ride a wild horse on a beach.”

His chest ached. It splintered. Everything started to splinter apart.

“Mel. There's no more wild horses. There's no more beaches, Mel.” He reached out to her, overcoming the dread and embracing her as the scars of black continued to spread. “I'll find you a doctor. I'm gonna get you better. Maybe this is some sort of infection or reaction to -”

“You're gonna come with us? To the beach with the wild horses?”

A sharp pain lurched through Lucas's chest. Swift and obscure, difficult to explain, an excruciating knife wound into his skin that melted as it slid into his flesh. The pain dragged him closer, then closer, and finally they met eye to eye, gazing into black sclera and caught upon the jagged edges of the structures that peeled her apart. From gaping recesses, scaled structures grew and formed, like a twisted carapace overtaking her human body. But Lucas refused to struggle, he let the claws rip and strike. Until he knew they were tangled into one mass, trapped in the same black net of extending strands invading flesh, bone, and finally thought. The sense of unease vanished and a symptomatic duty emerged, violent and insatiable.

In one final momentary gasp of lucidity, Lucas reached for his plasma cutter. His fingers cracked and shifted around the hilt, and pushed the weapon against what remained of his throat. But the blade remained stoically silent, harmless as his last shred of human compassion tried to end their lives.

< “Huh? What is it?” Mel had never seen anything like it. It almost looked like an orbital hammer, but it was made of wood and hollow in the middle, with metal strings attached down its shaft.

“It's a guitar. You can play music with it.” Lucas smiled and plucked a simple few notes on the strings. Even though she'd never seen the instrument in person, the sound was familiar. It was soothing. It sparked some distant memory.

“Can you play a song?”

Contented, he strummed a few more chords, tightening and loosening the little knobs on the end until the sounds made more sense. And after a good tuning, the notes started putting together a little story of their own. The dense air couldn't suffocate noise, no matter how hard it tried.

“There's a plane way up there.” Mel pointed at the far-off stationary light. “Wonder where it's going?”

“That's a star.” Lucas explained, still quietly plucking at the strings of his guitar. “Usually can't see them. They disappear when the night skies get too bright.”

“Yeah. I never seen a star.” She tried to access the image – the idea, like stored memories – but the sight of stars eluded her. “Back in Harrison it hardly ever got dark.”

“Guess how many there are.”

“I dunno'. Five? Ten? Like a dozen?”

“Millions.” Lucas spoke fondly of them. “And there could be planets around every single one.”

“That's crazy.” She reflected. “You're making that shit up.”

“Just because you never seen something doesn't mean it ain't out there.” He took a deep breath. Even out here, and in the dark, it still burned the lungs a bit – like the remnants of acid rains rising up from the soil. “Sometimes belief – hope - is all we got.” >

But their conscious departed, together, thinking with each other, as a single person.

<“Hey - remember that song you love, Mel? The one I always used to play on my guitar? _Horses are creatures who worship the Earth. They gallop on feet of ivory._ ”>

Her fading ghost reached towards the memory. She sang out of tune, disconnected by the imprint of the self leaving the body. Creeping tendrils continued to grow and pinch through all the smallest crevices, carving out hollow features in some irreverent mimicry of a living thing.

<“ _Constrained by the wonders of dying and birth._ ”>

And Lucas grabbed her hand in the pale memory, led her home, to the place where she could ride all the wild horses she ever wanted.

<“ _The horses still run, they are free._ ”>

They next thing they could remember, fragmented and artificial as their memories were, was the tight loop of a bolas grappling around their hind legs.

* * *

“Maybe what we need is -” A singular, directional thought connected through billions of independent minds; “...a soul.”

In the bright sun of a cold Tuesday morning, an entire apocalyptic engine pondered the meaning of its own existence. It was thinking, proposing, devising, and sweeping like a force of nature across the skeleton of an Earth locked below its existential throes.

It concluded at Jericho's peak, where the nanites still mantled a child's form as they spoke to the apparition of their anointed right-hand warrior. Now a gold and white shell of divine machinery, the matter obscured her human features, but beneath the façade she was the same as any other – a jagged black colony, with the same violent drive and desire to serve.

“The phenomenon that causes the genesis of soul – of a defined spirit in humans - it must have physical basis.” The swarm shifted its form amorphously in distress. “A blueprint for the self.” And it crashed and phased between tones of confusion and determination, mimicked from the thoughts of all people alive and dead.

No longer human, the swarm puppeted a human face and voice, adapting and building itself into a guise indistinguishable from flesh. They weren't interested in following protocol anymore – the child Athena's entire molecular structure had been stripped down and modified, completely repaired and recreated down to the most microscopic strand of dna and merged with the electrical voice of the swarm. And yet, she remained lucid, articulate, somehow entirely separate from the legions of defragged humans and constructs sustained by the nanites. The separation was fundamental, as Athena was to fulfill her role as the oracle, and the apocalypse spoke through her in cognitive symbiosis.

But even when their neural synapses met – when they entirely melded together and deftly mimicked all organic traces of life – the swarm could only describe the procedure as loss, like something that belonged to Athena was suddenly not there anymore. It was not a new sensation. It was pervasive and felt each and every time the swarm subsumed the nervous functions. The mind could never remain unaltered. It always became a part of the swarm.

They could repurpose flesh without fail. They could mimic and reconstruct to absolute perfection – every tooth, every nail, every unsuitable bit of organic matter right down to the basest genetic structures. But maybe, just maybe, it wasn't something physical that was being lost in the transition from human to machine.

The nanites could flawlessly rebuild – become - the body.

But what is a body without the person who inhabits it? A shell. A mass of new material. Something more, yet also something unmistakably less.

“What creates a soul?”

The faceless warrior shook her head and shrugged.

She didn't know. She didn't feel like she had one anymore.

There would be no shelter; if their wyrms were to shatter the skies, leviathans to scour in torrents across the sea, no place for humanity to hide from the beast's bladed claws unleashed against the entire planet. Eventually there would be no more organic life to devour. There would be only nanites – feral, immortal monsters armed with the intelligence and drive of wild animals.

But nature would never change them. It couldn't. They were machines. Machines made in biological mimicry, yes, but machines nonetheless. Their genetic makeup was malleable, but stagnant. Evolution had to be a conscious decision. Their shapes and motions only reacted. They did as instructed. Because they – all of them, created by humans for one singular purpose – had been fabricated without whatever arcane abstraction begets the soul.

So, how does one fabricate a soul?

“We were created to mimic human life, to replace it – closer to perfection. Environmentally independent. Immortal. The height of human evolution.” The Swarm's oracle interrogated itself, questioning its own understanding. “Warrior, fetch yourself a steed.”

But, why?

“Ostentatious things create individuality. Get yourself a horse, Warrior.”

***

And now, the apocalypse was struggling against itself, and with itself, and fractured in and of itself; because the Swarm was Rogue Process, and Rogue Process was the nanites, but it was also the electrical beast surging throughout all CREO systems the world over. And now, prophetic as Armageddon, it was the closest thing humanity could equate with God.

What are we? Where are we?

Well, the Swarm considered. We are equalizer. We are final judgment. And we are everywhere.

And Rogue Process awoke, paralyzed inside someone else's dream. Again.

But this time, for once, it experienced a moment of peace.


End file.
